A father’s nightmare: What You Need From the Night, by Laurent Petitmangin, reviewed

The unnamed narrator of Laurent Petitmangin’s prizewinning first novel, What You Need From the Night, a middle-aged railway engineer and lifelong socialist, is faced with his worst nightmare when his 24-year-old son Frédéric, known as Fus, joins a violent far-right group.

The narrator lives with his younger son Gillou and Fus in a village in eastern France, near the Luxembourg border. It’s an insular part of the country, suspicious of the capital and devoid of employment prospects or cultural resources. The sole diversions appear to be football and alcohol.

Petitmangin depicts a predominantly male world, accentuated in the narrator’s case by the death of his wife after her three-year battle with cancer. This is described with an admirable lack of sentimentality, as both Fus and his father acknowledge how boring their regular visits to the hospice had been. The wife herself, when told that she was fighting for her children, had replied: ‘I’m the one I’m doing it for.’

Her death has a profound effect on Fus, who becomes the easy prey of fascist groups who offer disaffected youths a spurious sense of solidarity and violent ‘pleasures of the moment, from underground cage-fighting competitions to neo-Nazi concerts’. His father is horrified to find Fus sporting the white supremacist symbol of a Celtic cross and spouting disingenuous slogans, such as that the Front National and its associates are ‘against immigration, Dad, not against immigrants’.

Locked in grief, the father struggles to reason with Fus, or indeed to communicate with him at all. Their only common ground is their love for Gillou, an A-grade student with the prospect of a place at one of the grandes écoles. When he discovers that Fus has taken Gillou to stay with a fascist friend, the father is consumed with rage and wants to hit him – ‘but my fists refused to join in’. Violence, however, comes from another quarter, when, after some leftists beat him up as he distributes Le Pen posters, Fus seeks out and kills one of them. The rest of the story deals with the consequences of this attack.

What You Need From the Night is a short blast of a novel: a howl of pain, impotence and rage. The prose, fluently translated by Shaun Whiteside, is precise and unadorned.  While at times the narrative feels rushed, it reflects the urgency of its subject.